Category: home/garden

Sarah has developed a new Hugelkultur initiative in the backyard. (I previously wrote about backyard Hugelkultur way back in June 2008.)

What, you ask, is Hugelkultur?  Think of it as very slow composting.

Hugelkulture is the practice of composting large woody material to create a raised garden bed. It is a way of dealing with excess amounts of woody garden wastes, for example prunings, hedge clippings, brassica stems, or brashwood.

The name comes from German – hügelkultur translates as “hill culture”.

The technique involves digging a circular trench about 1′ (30 cm) deep and 5′ (1.5 m) wide, in the centre of which is dug another hole 1′ (30 cm) deep hole. The material is piled in. Turf (grass) is then stacked face down on top, then layers of compost, well rotted leaves and manure, etc as available. The layers break down slowly and creating rich humus over four or five years. It is claimed that this is ideal for growing hungry crops such as zucchinis (courgettes) or strawberries.

As the years pass, the deep soil of the raised bed becomes incredibly rich and loaded with soil life. As the wood shrinks, it makes more tiny air pockets – so your hugelkultur becomes self tilling. The first few years, the composting process will slightly warm the soil giving a slightly longer growing season, in temperate and cold climates.

We dug out what looked like a large grave which soon filled with water.  For a week or so the girls would say things like “can we go play in the grave?” to creepy effect.  (In fact, the presence of this inexplicable gravesite in the backyard, slowly filling with water, created a very Rear Window effect.) Then, after it seemed to be starting to breed insects, not to mention becoming a likely death trap for skunks or other smaller mammals, Sarah filled it with sticks and branches and we all went out to jump on the branches and break them as much as possible and drive them down into the ground; and then we loaded the dirt back on top.  Sarah claims it will somehow all be fertile compost in a year or two.

I swear to god we don’t have a pesky former neighbor buried under all that…

Sarah took the plunge and joined in on a community garden plot.  Or rather, 4 plots, I believe, as part of a team of five people.  Here she is planting some onions.

It’s great — the Willy Streeter Community Garden, a former pig-farm (apparently) a little more than a half mile from our house, very convenient, right near the Y and a playground.  Should be a good spring-summer family activity.  For various reasons the home garden thing hadn’t been working as well as we hoped for vegetables, there were some light/shade issues.  But now that we’ve started, it seems to make so much sense to do it more communally.  Everything’s nicely set up at the community space, with the land tilled, manure available, and a hose right there.  Our friend Leah is an artist whose work involves plants, gardens and seeds — I’ve seen her described as an enviro-sculptor — and one perk of having her part of the group is that she has a big backlog of nice organic seeds.  When I was there helping out a bit on Sunday, we were planting onions and leeks and parsley.

A decade ago we lived in Hyde Park, Chicago for two years and we have friends who’ve been heavily involved in the community garden there.  We enjoyed a lot of pesto from basil planted in that garden — Anthony and Kirsten used to bring home big laundry baskets of it and have basil-making parties.  Unfortunately, the garden is being razed by U. Chicago — a sad story [this is the Chicago Reader article about it].

Take a glass and put some fruit-fly bait in the bottom.  A piece of tomato or banana works well.

Cover the top with saran wrap and poke some decent-sized small holes in the top [just realized my holes have been too big — they should be tiny, made with a pencil tip or some such].  Use a rubber band to affix.

Put the trap on your counter and let the hunt begin.  Every morning and sometimes every few hours subsequently I have to cover it with my hand and bring it outside to release the catch.  (I feel kind of silly letting them go free, but it’s too much trouble to kill them).  I find it kind of fascinating that the cup is often hot from the methane emitted by the rotting banana.

It’s gotten hot and sultry, and too many fruitflies buzzing around makes me feel like I’m in Baby Doll.

We dug up the boxwood bushes in front of the house.  Waiting to see if we get any takers.  Sarah commented that the house no longer has that “New England mental institution, Brick n’ Boxwoods look.”

When we came home after over a month away we found a very damp basement.  No actual puddles or leaks but a kind of miasmic moldy atmosphere and, we discovered, some actual mold in some cabinets.

We went out and bought a new energy-efficient dehumidifier (we had one that looks like it dated from the 1980s).  But Sarah also suspected that we had a gutter-drainage issue and when she dug down to look, it turned out that someone had once tried to repair a broken drainage pipe with a plastic shopping bag.  So, we dug a whole new drainage ditch after going to Lowes and getting what we needed (the piping, etc).  Of course I would never be able to do this competently but Sarah was able to chat with the Lowes guys and figure it out.

So we spent yesterday afternoon and some of today’s digging the ditch and cutting tree roots with a pole-axe thing that Sarah was calling an adze.  Especially today in 90 degree heat this was really hard work and good exercise.

I developed a blister on my hand so at the Los Campesinos! show I couldn’t clap very enthusiastically.

When I badgered her for a figure, Sarah claimed that we may have saved about $900 by doing this ourselves.  I don’t know if this is true but I like the idea.

Let it rain!

Sarah is working on a major project — rebuilding the wall adjoining our front driveway. It looked very picturesque, covered with ivy, but sagging & bulging all over.  When we pulled the ivy off we realized that it was in mid-collapse.  This is a classic D.I.Y./ My Wife Does it Herself project in that I have had very little to do with it.  Depending on her mood, Sarah is resigned or mildly irritated about this.  I did carry some heavy stones on several occasions, I’ll say in my defense.

Sarah did a lot of research on the mechanics and hydraulics, etc., of supporting walls in preparation, but she is not truly doing it herself — she now has Jack and his assistant Hunter on the project, but she has so far worked side by side with them the entire time.  They spent all day Wednesday on it and one other afternoon.  Sarah pressed them to set a dollar amount on the value of her labor.  “Admit it, would I be the $10 per hour guy?” she asked and they assured her, “no, no, you’d be the $12/hour guy.”  She felt OK about that — still on the bottom of the pay scale, but respectable.

The one thing Sarah is regretting so far is that she realized too late that they had probably already destroyed the chipmunk home.  We have this chipmunk Chippy who is hanging out in the driveway 75% of the time and had some kind of lair in the rock wall which has now obviously been obliterated.  But we are hoping that he’ll have time this Fall to figure out some new arrangement.